1. Roy DeCarava: Selected Works
David Zwirner, London
The first UK exhibit of Roy DeCarava’s photography in more than thirty years was a sustained study in the quietly mesmeric power of light and shadow. Whether through official pictures or mysterious landscapes and interiors, DeCarava imbued the daily experience of Black city life in America with a hushed respect and formal rigour that brought to life a world that was all however unnoticeable to the mainstream. This retrospective was a revelatory glance of a particular way of seeing that covered 6 decades and continuously evaded the apparent. As his widow, Sherry Turner DeCarava, who curated the exhibition, put it: “He was defined by looks, not just location or sociology.”
2. Chris Killip, retrospective
Professional photographers’ Gallery, London, up until 19 February
Spare and pragmatical … Bever, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, 1983, by Chris Killip. Photo: Chris Killip
One the most prominent British documentary photographers of the last 50 years, Chris Killip, who passed away in 2020, finally received the retrospective he was worthy of with this comprehensive exhibit. Killip’s abiding subject was the deindustrialisation of England’s north-east in the 1970s and 80s, which he caught by immersing himself deeply in the neighborhoods that had most to lose in the process. The outcomes, whether shipyards or skinheads, miners or fishers, are spare and unsentimental, however filled with humanity and undercut with what he referred to as “a sense of seriousness” for an England that was quickly vanishing prior to his eyes.3.
Vivian Maier: Anthology
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
Revelatory … New York, 1953, by Vivian Maier. Picture: Estate of Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection/Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
Another revelatory retrospective that deftly highlighted the frequently adventurous artistry of a visionary professional photographer who passed away in 2009, aged 83, two years after the discovery of her large archive. Since then, the romantic myth of Vivian Maier, the secretive baby-sitter with the electronic camera, has actually tended to overshadow the real work, which varies from street scenes to clandestinely shot pictures, sculptural closeups of upper bodies and materials to purposefully conceptual self-portraits. Here, the arc of her constantly imaginative life was traced in just 140 photographs that spoke volumes about her self-assurance and appearing indifference to popularity and acknowledgment.4.
Chris Killip and Graham Smith: 20/20
Augusta Edwards Gallery, London
Groundbreaking … Bennetts Corner (Giro Corner), South Bank, Middlesbrough, 1982, by Graham Smith. Picture: Graham Smith
As a revealing counterpoint to the Photographers’ Gallery retrospective of Chris Killip’s work, Augusta Edwards homed in on the friendship and creative dynamic in between Killip and the more elusive Graham Smith. The latter is a legendary figure in British photography not least due to the fact that of his long refusal, previously, to engage with the gallery system. The program nodded to a groundbreaking exhibition of their work, Another Nation, at the Serpentine Gallery in 1985, the title of which has become a lot more relevant in the interim. Also, the strange poetry of Smith’s candid pictures of working-class drinkers in the bars of his native Middlesbrough, which make love peeks of alcohol-fuelled reveries and encounters.5.
Sasha Huber: You Name It
Autograph, London, up until 25 March 2023
High and magnificent … Sasha Huber in her film Rentyhorn at Autograph, London. Picture: Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma/Sasha Huber
Reprising over a years of the Swiss-Haitian artist’s work checking out the tradition of manifest destiny in her native Switzerland and beyond, You Name It is a multimedia exhibition that repays attention to its intricate modern and historic resonances. It centres on the dissentious, 19th-century figure of Louis Agassiz, a renowned archeologist and glaciologist, who was also a severe supporter of clinical racism who actively championed the segregation and subjugation of Black individuals on the grounds that God had developed them as inferior beings. Utilizing films that record her actions to relabel a mountain named after him in the Swiss Alps, alongside historic material and reimagined portraits of some of his topics– made by “dressing” them in meticulously applied fabric– Huber explores the roots of colonial racism and its contemporary echoes. Prompt and intricate work.